jmlucjav / wsltty

Mintty as a terminal for Bash on Ubuntu on Windows / WSL

Mintty as a terminal for Bash on Ubuntu on Windows / WSL.

Overview

Run the installer to install

• wsltty package components (see below) in the user’s application directory (where WSL is also installed)
• an empty wsltty “home directory” to enable storage of a mintty config file
• a Desktop Shortcut and a Start Menu Shortcut to start WSL with a login bash in the Windows user profile directory; to start in the Linux home directory instead, add a cd command to your Linux $HOME/.profile script
• context menu entries for Windows Explorer to start WSL with a bash in the respective directory
• a script wsl.bat to invoke wsltty manually; copy the script from %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty to %SYSTEMROOT%\System32 if desired
• an uninstall script that can be invoked manually to remove shortcuts and context menu entries

Configuration

Command line scripts wsl.bat and wsl~.bat

• To enable invocation of this script from WIN+R or from cmd.exe, copy it from %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty into %SYSTEMROOT%\System32. (The package does not do this to avoid trouble with missing admin privileges.)
• To start the terminal in the current directory when calling the script from the command line, modify it (or a copy for this purpose) and remove the final -l parameter.
• To enforce starting in your Linux home directory, do either of:
  • On Linux side, add a cd command to your $HOME/.profile.
  • Use wsl~.bat instead of wsl.bat (or rename it as desired).

Desktop shortcut and Start menu shortcut

To enforce starting in your Linux home directory, do either of:

• On Linux side, add a cd command to your $HOME/.profile.
• Use the shortcut Bash ~ on UoW in Mintty instead.

Mintty settings

Mintty can maintain its configuration file in various locations, with the following precedence:

• file given with mintty option -c
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\home\%USERNAME%\.minttyrc
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\home\%USERNAME%\.config\mintty\config
• %APPDATA%\mintty\config
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\wsltty\etc\minttyrc

Note that the %APPDATA%\mintty\config option provides the possibility to maintain common mintty settings for various installations (like wsltty, Cygwin, MinGW/msys, Git for Windows).

Components

For mintty, see the Mintty homepage.

It is based on Cygwin and includes its runtime library (sources).

For interacting with WSL, it uses wslbridge.